Stories of an inhabitant of right here, right noW

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The last few years have been quite special. Some things have happened and they were very sad. Some other things have been very happy.

Now that the end of the year approaches, it’s time to do a little review. I am not a big fan of doing what everybody else does, but any excuse is as good as other to rewind, and consider where we are to then decide where we want to go to.

We all have goals (if you don’t, please stop reading, find them, write them down and have them somewhere close when you can see them every day!), but what’s a goal without knowing where we stand at the moment.

Picture yourself in an unknown city, standing in the middle of the street. You are out for sightseeing and there is a certain place that you would like to go to. You search for it in a map. Did you find it? Cool, that is your destination (your goal). What’s next? You guessed it: you need to know where you are in that city at the moment in order to map out the way that will get you there.

This time around this goal setting exercise is a bit different from others. This year I’ve reached an age that makes me feel like I am in the peak of the mountain and then everything else is downwards… I don’t really feel “downwards” but when I look back at my life up until this point, it feels a bit that way.

Then I know I tell everyone otherwise but in a way it is what I feel. It’s like I don’t really believe it is the peak but sometimes in certain things (goals) I think about, my first automatic response or reaction is “I’m too old for that, I should have done that so-many years ago”. Then I realize: “no, not old at all, I can do that anytime!”

This year has been a lot of looking back and realizing that a long time has passed but I actually feel the same I used to when I was twenty or even twenty-five years younger. I am still that person who loved music and wanted to travel the world, have an exciting life, and not regretting anything.

Did I do all those things that I wanted? Most definitely. I have done all that I wanted. When I look back I’ve had amazing years and experiences. I feel the same though, but I don’t see myself the same way. I’ve realized this when listening to music.

I’ve listened to pretty much the same bands over the years since I was a teenager or since I was in my twenties (you can tell by the songs I choose to accompany my posts here). Their music has evolved, just like we all have evolved. I’ve been “rescuing” this music mainly this year and have been listening to it again. While I still enjoy the music, maybe I don’t feel as identified with all the lyrics anymore. I guess we match (or at least I did) what we listen to to our state of mind at the moment.

At that time, awkwardness or the feeling of inadequacy mixed with certain level of rebelliousness and wanting to be different at the same time made me prone to certain type of content in everything I listened to or read or watched. There were many contradictions and opposing thoughts, but I guess that was normal at that point in life.

Now that music takes me back to how I felt when I listened to it. It is that powerful and I love that about music.

Now one of these bands I used to listened to published a new album with lyrics that resembled those of those years, but well, actually a little more “decaffeinated” and “soft” and it almost like they wanted to bring back those years… To me it just sounded strange that fifty-year-olds were trying to sound like twenty-year-olds again. It sounded a bit frivolous to me and of course, very disappointing.

What I realized after that is that we all have “calmed down”. The relentless dissatisfaction of youth has been substituted by the realization that taking action is its best remedy. If I don’t like something now, I work to change it.

When I look at my every day, it just looks like I’m not accomplishing enough or fast enough, but it is only when I look back, when I realized that I have accomplished a lot. I am sure you have too. If you doubt it, write in a piece of paper, decade by decade of your life, every success you have had, no matter how small and obvious it might seem. You will soon realize you have done a lot and also how much more you have to go.

I feel the same (I am the same) but my priorities and goals have changed, my way of approaching things and dealing with issues have changed, how could they not?

I’ve said I’ve done everything that I wanted so far. I’ll make sure I’ll keep it that way and continue to do whatever it is I want.

To many more successes.

This post best read while listening to “You Only Live Once” by The Strokes

It’s been over a year since I last published here. It’s not that I didn’t have anything to write about but quite the opposite. Sometimes too much stuff gets thrown your way and it’s hard to find focus. And it’s even worse for someone like me, who likes to have anything under control and takes forever to find the perfect words to put in a post before hitting “publish”.

I was ready to write about something else today but I changed my mind when I saw how crazy fast this time has passed. It definitely doesn’t feel like I last wrote such a long time ago.

About ten years ago I was warned about how fast time goes after your life reaches your third decade, but I just didn’t realize how fast people meant by “fast”. It is true that we don’t really take advice when we are young, and they we find out how all those things we were told actually came true as years passed.

Since June last year many things have changed and in hindsight, everything was good. Life evolves, and it is exciting.

Some other things don’t change, though. So I wanted to take the opportunity to thank that loyal audience that keeps reading what I write here. So thank you for being there.

This issue is been bothering me a lot lately and I’ve finally realized that I either let it out or it will keep sucking the life out of me.

I have many friends who have young children, so I get to hear all about their days with them, and holidays and everything they do with them and what they need to deal with. The more I hear about it all, the more I realize that my childhood was completely different.

I was raised in what I call now a dictatorial family. I would say that my father was the dictator and my mother the general or whatever head of the army that follows the instructions of the dictator, passes all information and complies with it all.

It felt like my brother and I were mere accessories in my parents’ life. I didn’t feel loved, or cared for, I just felt like we were supplied for.

I see my friends doing lots of activities with (and exclusively for) their kids, such as playing sports, going to movies, organizing costume parties, or basically anything that their kids would enjoy. I was part of the basketball team in my primary school. I was not that good, like many other girls in the team, but I was definitely the only one who didn’t join the games against other schools on Saturday mornings, because my parents wouldn’t take me. Our Saturday morning ritual consisted in going downtown to the market to get fresh produce (even though my mother was a homemaker and could do that every day), and then Saturday afternoon we would go to a department store to walk around. Sunday mornings were made to go to the port and walk around. As you can imagine, it was all very exciting for two kids.

For Christmas one year when I was around 5 or 6 we had a bike as a present. That bicycle sat unused for years and years until we outgrew it while still brand new because my parents never decided to take us out to the street on summer evenings. We never learned how to ride a bike. I didn’t ride that bicycle (or any other) for the first time until I was 16.

My parents were rude when talking to us. It seems most of them times they were annoyed by our presence. My brother and I used to blame each other every time the other had done “something wrong” and had upset my father, because it would put him in a constantly yelling state against the rest of the house for days in a row. So plainly ridiculous, because that “something wrong” was probably that we had argued (as all siblings do about toys or any other unimportant matter).

My parents never asked us how school was. They never encouraged us to talk with them about our lives. But we tried to tell things, until we ended up stopping talking too much. Every time we were excited about something, we would talk about it and their only response would be negative, them telling us why it’s not “as easy” or “as good” or “as special” or whatever, so we always left conversations feeling we had been verbally slapped in the face. Therefore, no more talking and telling things so we wouldn’t have to hear any cr*p from the people that were supposed to support us. However, they would support anybody else except for us, I felt like they didn’t trust us, like we were never good enough. They were the nicest people to whoever that wasn’t us.

My only fun times were when I sat down to listen to the radio for hours and hours in a row. I would keep track of the songs that were played, the artist, the album it belonged to and even the time it was played on the radio! One of the most exciting times of the year was Christmas because all stations had countdown to that year’s top songs. But Christmas in general (and any other family time) sucked real bad.

Every day, my mother was there to tell my father as soon, as he came back from work, anything that she thought my brother or I had done really wrong that day. So as soon as my father came through the door and we went to warmly greet him, he would turn to us and out of the blue slap us in the face and tell us it should be the last time that we… (add whatever trivial thing you can think of: argue with your brother/sister or talk back to your mother, etc.).

We (my brother and I) were extremely good kids. We had ridiculously good grades through primary school and most part of high school. We were not mean kids, we were very good hearted, very quiet and very obedient.

Really, I look at how kids behave now and I am appalled at how stupidly quiet and easy-to-deal-with my brother and I were. When we used to go to the kids doctor for example my brother and I would be seating down, quietly looking at the other kids while they were running like crazy along the corridors, playing hide and seek and making lots of noise, just as kids do. We would just sat there, doing nothing, every single time, because otherwise we would get yelled at.

I remember being yelled at, almost every day, for the most stupid things. I felt like my father was really angry at life all the time and he took any occasion he could to pass it on to my brother and me. My mother was the accomplice, she showed no mercy.

There was one time that my brother came home early from his soccer practice one Saturday afternoon (he was 13 or so) because he had had an injury and had broken his left pinkie finger. What was the first thing that my father did when he opened the door? He yelled at him. And for days he acted around the house as if some major thing have been done to him personally, instead of caring about my brother’s wellbeing. Up to this day I still don’t understand why he was so mad about my brother breaking a finger.
If I look back in time into my childhood there are quite a few moments that I remember and they all bring me the same memories: it was an unkind environment, I was afraid all the time and I was utterly unhappy.

When I was a teenager I started realizing that I felt weird touching people or being physically approached, (you know when sometimes you play silly with your friends and you sort of push them or when you’re trying to console them, you hold them, and hug them or pinch them if you wanted to laugh…etc) I realized that none of those came naturally for me. It was rather the opposite, I felt like I suddenly needed to pull back and not be touched. I realized my parents never held my brother or me, they never hugged us and tell us stories or asked us things, they never tried to console us when we were sad. They would only act as annoyed by our feelings and always said something that made us feel our worries were completely irrelevant and unimportant to them.
If I had to create a list with the top ten most unkind moments in my life, my parents would have been the cause of pretty much all of them.

I feel like we were cheated. We were shown one type of childhood that was completely wrong.

I still feel the pain somehow, because I know that so many ways I act now, have been determined by that absurd upbringing.

That is why I can’t stand unfair treatment, I’ve seen it way too many times. That is why I am scared of “big conversations”, because I feel the outcome will probably completely unexpected and sh*t can come out of the blue for me for no reason.

They created insecure children, who were afraid of standing up for themselves in case they were told off or yelled at because no matter as careful as we could be, we could trigger any unimaginable outcome, there was always a mind that was capable of twisting arguments in an unsuspected way.

Even though I know things have changed because I no longer live with them and their influence over me is not that strong at all (also I am an adult now) at times I think that I hate them. I am aware that my upbringing made me the person I am at the moment but I still think about those moments and I resent them for that. Also because they could be (at least) part of the reason why my brother is no longer in my life. And lastly because they are part of the reason why I am scared of having kids, as I don’t want to be like them, I don’t want to raise a kid to be as unhappy, fearful and insecure as I was.

A week ago I went to a birthday party. It didn’t get too crazy because it was a party that was thrown for a toddler 😊. She’s the daughter of one of my best friends.

I think me and my Mr. were one of the only people there that had no children. It gave me time to look around a lot and think about my group of friends.

Some of them I have known since college and after a lot of travelling, moving around, and then coming back, the friendship has continued ever since. Others have joined a little (or a lot) afterwards.

That weekend at that party things went slow motion in my head for a while as I saw them playing with their kids. I looked back at everything they (we) have endured, the astounding moments we have shared, whether together on in the distance, and also the harder times we have gone through.

Of course I knew way before that moment, but it came even clearer to me then: my friends are such amazing individuals. They have all gone through their struggles, their good and bad times, and here they are, I love every bit about them because they are everything that a person (and a good friend) needs to be.

I am so proud of them, and everything they’ve become. I feel blessed to have found them and being able to consider them part of my family.

Today by pure chance, I’ve been listening to music that I haven’t listened to in a while. A while basically means years ago, as I was a teenager.

You know that music transports you to whenever you used to hear that particular song, artist, or album altogether. Today it was a bit different. Music took me back to some time ago but what I’ve felt was not the same. For some reason I’ve felt like an spectator of my own life. It felt a bit awkward, like that teenager felt, but mostly I’ve felt like I was looking at my life from really far away, as if I was already 90 years old and I was staring at that youngster trying to tell her about what she’s missing because she’s thinking too much and being too self-conscious.

I started thinking about the things that I had experienced at that time when the music was on, and for some reason the feeling that stayed with me today was the feeling of “I need to do something”.

Every time I hear (or read) about one of my favorite artists’ life, it makes me want to create something. I feel like I have something that I need to communicate and let out, but I don’t know what it is or how to do it.

I’ve recently published a book, and I thought that that would calm me down somehow, but on the contrary, it has awaken my “hunger” for creating more stuff, whether it is prose, poems, designs or songs or… So I’ve discovered a new obsession for my days now: I can’t stop thinking about what I could (need to) do (create) in order to set myself free from the burden that is knowing that I need to let my soul speak somehow, but I don’t know why or how. But I will keep trying to figure it out.

We all have our weaknesses. Some of them we don’t even recognize, some of them we learn to live with, and some other we try to overcome.

One of my “strongest” weaknesses has always been being too nice. It could also be described as “being a sucker”.

I remember situations in the past when I can see clearly how stupid, or naive or both I have been. I can feel the frustration of my current self, seeing how badly my previous self was being treated and how I did nothing to change it.

Over the course of many many years of self-training, I have been learning to look after myself first, analyzing every bit of other people’s reaction to understand whether I was being taken advantage of or not, whether they were being truthful, just wanted something from me or they were just laughing at my expense. For years I’ve re-educated myself to be mean, ruthless and not caring about other people’s opinion, to despise other ways of thinking if I didn’t like the person, being purposely resentful and actually enjoying the whole process without feeling guilty.

On the positive side, it is a good improvement for me somehow, because I’ve learned that I can change things that were embedded in my personality when I was a kid. On the negative side, that sort of detachment that keeps me from feeling so much pain, makes me a bit of an iceberg (or even a not-so-passive hammer) sometimes.

I block situations or comments or people altogether when they hurt and I build an isolating wall of spite sound them, while my mind goes other way to forget about the pain.

If for so many years I was very nice and so many afterwards I wasn’t, so what, the average still comes out as ok, right? But it reminds me of the way a rubber ball would behave if you throw it violently against water: it will sink in the beginning, then it will also violently fly back up out if the water to finally quietly float.

I guess I’d rather be unlinked than taken for a fool. I see it as a survival instinct, but I guess that doesn’t make it alright.

It is already February. It is time to realize whether we are still committed to our new year’s resolutions or we are already leaving them to be forgotten until next January.

My main resolution this year was to not complain so much, to live things as they come and enjoy every moment. No more thinking about the past, and thinking only a little (whatever is just necessary) about the future.

I realized there will always be situations that are going to bother me, but now what I just tell myself is “peanuts”. Then I turn around and start thinking about something else. I am aware it sounds strange but this is my reasoning:

We have all heard that grass is greener on the other side, so therefore, why are we not looking at our grass from the other side of the street? When I’m not happy about something now, I step outside of my life for a moment and see it from the outside, see it how everyone else sees it and sees me. Seeing things from accross the street makes them seem shinier, lighter, better and happier. I realize that my life is good and the things I complain about are just “peanuts”, nothing, nonsense.

I have the most wonderful friends. I have a job that I like. I have amazing work colleagues. I have an extraordinary life companion. I live in a free country, I travel, I do fun activities… The list could go on. (And yours could too!).

It turns out after all, it is not so bad to be me.
[This post best read while listening to: